When George Washington became President in 1789, life expectancy at birth for Americans was 34.5 years for males and 36.5 years for females. In 1801, when Thomas Jefferson became president, 20 percent of the people in the U.S. were slaves. Globally, there are some 1,800 thunderstorms in progress at any given moment and lightning strikes the planet 100 times every second. Lightning kills more people in the United States (400 per year) than any other natural disaster...

Recently, the director of communications of Taco Bell Corporation was asked to prepare a memo reviewing the company’s training programs and materials. In the memo was a reference to the “pedagogical approach” used by one of the training manuals. The day after the memo was circulated to members of the executive committee, the author of the memo was summoned to the office of the director of Human Resources and told that the executive vice president wanted him out of the building by noon. ...

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK was the title of a best-selling book back in the 60’s. Being a novice at life at the time, I bought a copy. When I finished reading it, I knew as much about sex as I did before I read it, which was about as much as I knew about brain surgery...

The search for the ideal place to live has been a big part of my life. I prefer a quiet rural area far from neighbors with a hilly terrain, affordable housing, moderate weather and earthy women. I've lived in scores of places in 12 states now and have yet to find heaven on earth, but I keep getting closer...

Writing is a very risky business. You have to expose your soul to the world, then look at yourself in the mirror when the world fails to embrace your thoughts. Ernest Hemingway, American Author (1899 - 1961) Committed suicide, shooting himself with his favorite shotgun...

Life is often stranger than fiction. Compiled from various sources over time, the following items are purported to be true stories. Obviously, we can’t all be the brightest bulb on the tree. California, the land of fruit and nuts, always has more than its share of dim bulbs. ...

There are two annoying creatures that invade my little corner of the world during the summer months – tourists and chiggers. According to the dictionary, a chigger is a 6-legged mite larva that sucks the blood of vertebrates and causes intense irritation...

Life is a journey without a map. You come to a fork in the road of life and choose a direction. When things that once shocked you begin to amuse you, you've crossed the first barrier of true wisdom. Every time I reach a new age in life, I spend a long day dwelling on my painful past, blessing the present and ignoring the future. Then I wake up the next day and start all over again...

The summer of 1947 was an amazingly eventful moment in human history, in more ways than one. In June of 1947, a French scholar named Jean Doresse discovered the importance of 52 books, referred to as the Nag Hammadi Codices, found in December of 1945 in a cave in Upper Egypt. ...

A synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence of events that are not connected, often involving a metaphysical overtone. It's a psychically conditioned relativity of time and space. An Internet website recently had an interesting list of amazing coincidences. However, they seem more like synchronicities to me -- like a shot of destiny to wake up the soul...

Forrest Fenn is a former Vietnam fighter pilot and successful art dealer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1988, Fenn was diagnosed with cancer. During his illness, he came up with an idea to hide a chest of treasure for anyone to find. He filled a chest with rare coins, gold nuggets, gemstones, jewelry and a jar containing his autobiography. His intention was to hide the treasure chest and end his life nearby...

On February 3, 1959, a small airplane crashed in a field near Clear Lake, Iowa. The pilot and his passengers, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, all perished. It was the day the music died. "I can't remember if I cried... When I read about his widowed bride... But something touched me deep inside... The day the music died." (from American Pie by Don McLean)...

Life is like an unorthodox teacher -- you get the test first and the lesson comes later. During the evening of January 26, 2009, my region of the country was having a severe ice storm. Ice was forming on trees, causing them to literally explode as large branches were falling, trees were splitting down the middle and some were toppling from the root...

Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at the University of Leicester in England, has collected data from more than 100 studies around the globe and created a list that ranks 178 countries on the basis of happiness -- the subjective perceived well-being of the populace within each country...

When I was in college, back in the 1960’s, I spent lots of time trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to be an architect or a mining engineer or a treasure hunter, depending on the mood of the day. Then I stumbled onto a brand new profession, called computer programming. It sounded technical, mysterious and lucrative. I decided to give it a try. It was a great way to make a living and lasted about 35 years...

On December 4, 1619, the first Thanksgiving celebration was held in America at the Berkeley Plantation in Virginia. Thirty-eight English settlers attended the event. It was part of their original charter to set aside one day every year to observe a day of thanksgiving for their annual harvest...

November 11 is Veteran's Day The War to End All Wars officially ended at 11:00 o’clock on the morning of November 11, 1918 -- the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month -- 11.11.11. It would later be called World War I. The following year, November 11 was set aside in the United States as Armistice Day, later to be called Veteran's Day, in memory of those who participated in World War I in order to ensure a lasting peace...

On January 14, 2011, Christian Heritage High School (Utah) beat West Ridge Academy (Utah) in a girl's basketball game by the score of 108-3. Even though Christian Heritage High thought it would be disrespectful to slow down the game, there were endless remarks about the ugliness and unsportsmanlike conduct in the outcome of the game by various national sports and news talking heads...

There's a tool shed in my backyard about the size and shape of a typical outhouse. We no longer have use for the outhouse around here, typical or otherwise, since we discovered the miracle of indoor plumbing. Under the tool shed lives an armadillo. His name is Armando...

One of the fastest ways to fail in life is to work so hard your manager will think you're after his job. In 1976, one year before our semi-blissful marriage of five years, my ex-wife and I went on a sailing adventure in the West Indies. We paid good money to be deckhands on a 248-foot, four-mast schooner, island-hopping the Leeward Islands of St. Martins, St. Barts, St Eustatius, St. Kitts and Nevis for two weeks...